Ask an MVP baseball player how he so consistently hits home runs, and you will probably get something that sounds nonsensical, counterintuitive or too vague to be helpful.
"I just kept on top of it," he might say. Or, "I just swung low to high. I've been working on that." Most likely, he'll probably say something like, "It just felt good. A good, natural swing. I've been swinging the bat well lately." The truth is that a baseball player's swing mechanics come so naturally to him that he rarely gives any thought to verbalizing any of hundreds of adjustments that might need to be made for him to send one into the bleachers. He doesn't need to be able to describe it, only to understand it himself. His bottom line boils down to a list of stats that determines his paycheck and the team's win/loss record at the end of the season. In other words, his ability to describe the mechanical process that allows him to bat well has little bearing on anything, as we don't need to be able to know how to bat in order to to function as citizens.
If there is any standard of comparison between reading and batting, the former has infinitely more depth, nuance and variation in its execution. Additionally, the skill is universally considered indispensible and foundational for success in thousands of professional fields, life experiences, or day-to-day interactions with friends and colleagues. It should be surprising, then, that in terms of describing the mechanics of a process he or she has mastered, a teacher can be every bit as hapless as the ballplayer in the example.
In "Teaching Students to Comprehend Informational Text Through Rereading," scholars Laura Hedin and Greg Conderman detail obstacles striving readers face in making sense of text and address them with counteractive strategies that striving readers might embrace.
In particular, Hedin and Conderman note that students 1) too often read without the purpose of building knowledge set in mind and 2) tend to abandon rereading strategies when assignments are too long or challenging. Students who were tutored in guided reading sessions that made use of engaging, illustrated text, reminders to read for understanding, emphasis on text containing key concepts and examples, and encouragement to reread for comprehension retained more knowledge from the text than their untutored counterparts.
A few rereading strategies Hedin and Conderman recommended in informational text were emphasizing placement of main ideas (usually at the beginning of the paragraph), highlighting definitions that followed/preceded key terms, keeping track of pronouns and their antecedents, learning how to read appositional phrases, and taking advantage of (and generating) text enhancements (bolding, highlighting, underlining) meant to create emphasis.
Significantly, Hendin and Conderman close by noting that "perhaps because teachers are good readers, they may underestimate the amount of practice readers need to master skills such as rereading or the effort it requires for some students."
In the classroom these issues may be addressed by a weekly in-class guided reading that takes text a few lines at a time, emphasizes main ideas, uses context, word origin and definition to make sense of unfamiliar vocabulary and model effective text annotation. Extra time during lunch and after school would be put to best use monitoring comprehension in the areas Hedin and Conderman specified.
Hedin and Conderman also noted the challenges vocabulary can pose to striving. It is critical to proactively address vocabulary for these readers, perhaps through the use of glossaries or word webs. The English language is unique among world languages for its wide swath of linguistic influences and its resultant dynamic properties. For these reasons, an understanding of the Greco-Latin roots that comprise some of the language's more academic lexicon may be an efficient--as one root corresponds to many words--and effective way to learn vocabulary. An understanding of word origin and a strong command of context may work together synergistically to render the dictionary a third-string reference that can serve to cement the definition of a given word once a student has a sense of how a word is used in a sentence, what context displays its meaning and what roots provide its makeup.
In a study completed by The National Endowment for the Arts in 2007, it was found that "'little more than a third of high school seniors now read proficiently,'' this, found in the article, "The Literacy Needs of Adolescents in Their Own Words." It is essential, now more than ever that teachers in all content areas give students the help they need with literacy. As mentioned above, teachers (as well as other adults) speak and write naturally that it is hard to verbalize to those younger who struggle with literacy what literacy means and how it can affect the future. According to the U.S. Department of Education, a student's future is heavily dependent on their reading ability on account of the way the global economy has changed from a few generations ago (Pitcher, et al., 2010). Teachers need to be equipped with a variety of tools in order to help their students better themselves and function in today's world.
Ask an MVP baseball player how he so consistently hits home runs, and you will probably get something that sounds nonsensical, counterintuitive or too vague to be helpful.
"I just kept on top of it," he might say. Or, "I just swung low to high. I've been working on that." Most likely, he'll probably say something like, "It just felt good. A good, natural swing. I've been swinging the bat well lately." The truth is that a baseball player's swing mechanics come so naturally to him that he rarely gives any thought to verbalizing any of hundreds of adjustments that might need to be made for him to send one into the bleachers. He doesn't need to be able to describe it, only to understand it himself. His bottom line boils down to a list of stats that determines his paycheck and the team's win/loss record at the end of the season. In other words, his ability to describe the mechanical process that allows him to bat well has little bearing on anything, as we don't need to be able to know how to bat in order to to function as citizens.
If there is any standard of comparison between reading and batting, the former has infinitely more depth, nuance and variation in its execution. Additionally, the skill is universally considered indispensible and foundational for success in thousands of professional fields, life experiences, or day-to-day interactions with friends and colleagues. It should be surprising, then, that in terms of describing the mechanics of a process he or she has mastered, a teacher can be every bit as hapless as the ballplayer in the example.
In "Teaching Students to Comprehend Informational Text Through Rereading," scholars Laura Hedin and Greg Conderman detail obstacles striving readers face in making sense of text and address them with counteractive strategies that striving readers might embrace.
In particular, Hedin and Conderman note that students 1) too often read without the purpose of building knowledge set in mind and 2) tend to abandon rereading strategies when assignments are too long or challenging. Students who were tutored in guided reading sessions that made use of engaging, illustrated text, reminders to read for understanding, emphasis on text containing key concepts and examples, and encouragement to reread for comprehension retained more knowledge from the text than their untutored counterparts.
A few rereading strategies Hedin and Conderman recommended in informational text were emphasizing placement of main ideas (usually at the beginning of the paragraph), highlighting definitions that followed/preceded key terms, keeping track of pronouns and their antecedents, learning how to read appositional phrases, and taking advantage of (and generating) text enhancements (bolding, highlighting, underlining) meant to create emphasis.
Significantly, Hendin and Conderman close by noting that "perhaps because teachers are good readers, they may underestimate the amount of practice readers need to master skills such as rereading or the effort it requires for some students."
In the classroom these issues may be addressed by a weekly in-class guided reading that takes text a few lines at a time, emphasizes main ideas, uses context, word origin and definition to make sense of unfamiliar vocabulary and model effective text annotation. Extra time during lunch and after school would be put to best use monitoring comprehension in the areas Hedin and Conderman specified.
Hedin and Conderman also noted the challenges vocabulary can pose to striving. It is critical to proactively address vocabulary for these readers, perhaps through the use of glossaries or word webs. The English language is unique among world languages for its wide swath of linguistic influences and its resultant dynamic properties. For these reasons, an understanding of the Greco-Latin roots that comprise some of the language's more academic lexicon may be an efficient--as one root corresponds to many words--and effective way to learn vocabulary. An understanding of word origin and a strong command of context may work together synergistically to render the dictionary a third-string reference that can serve to cement the definition of a given word once a student has a sense of how a word is used in a sentence, what context displays its meaning and what roots provide its makeup.
In a study completed by The National Endowment for the Arts in 2007, it was found that "'little more than a third of high school seniors now read proficiently,'' this, found in the article, "The Literacy Needs of Adolescents in Their Own Words." It is essential, now more than ever that teachers in all content areas give students the help they need with literacy. As mentioned above, teachers (as well as other adults) speak and write naturally that it is hard to verbalize to those younger who struggle with literacy what literacy means and how it can affect the future. According to the U.S. Department of Education, a student's future is heavily dependent on their reading ability on account of the way the global economy has changed from a few generations ago (Pitcher, et al., 2010). Teachers need to be equipped with a variety of tools in order to help their students better themselves and function in today's world.
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